Cutting Down

Apparently, it's not just the STEM fields that are finding incoming students unprepared. From the Daily Cal:

Faculty in the humanities are grappling with a changing educational landscape as debates arise regarding student preparation and nationwide headlines question students’ abilities to read longer texts. Some faculty across the humanities report cutting down the amount of reading they assign to students, though others have found that students are keeping up with a standard workload the same way they would have years ago. Carlos Noreña, a UC Berkeley history professor specializing in ancient history,said the amount of reading he could comfortably assign while expecting students to read a “substantial” portion of it has dropped over the past 20 years at UC Berkeley. “We are now reaching a crisis point where if the number (of pages) goes down further, it’s unclear to me whether my discipline of history can really be taught,” Noreña said. 

English professor Grace Lavery, said while she noticed some students struggling with denser Charles Dickens novels, these issues weren’t new or necessarily problematic. “The reason is that the Dickens novels I teach are long and difficult,” Lavery said. “I imagine that if I had been teaching these novels in the same way back in the 1950s, I would have had exactly the same problems.” ...

...Some faculty said they are increasingly excerpting longer works rather than having students read full books. Margaret Byrne Chair in American History Mark Brilliant said the earliest version of the History of California and the American West course he taught required seven full books, while his most recent iteration exclusively consisted of excerpts... Brilliant also noted that the number of books and pages he assigned have shrunk over the 22 years that he has taught at UC Berkeley.

Fellow history professor Trevor Jackson said... his students avoid using AI to write, but sometimes ask it to summarize texts while reading. “I found that very upsetting, because I’ve read the AI summary of my own book, and it’s all wrong,” Jackson said. “Even a good summary is still not grappling with the text.” 

Full story at https://www.dailycal.org/news/campus/academics/reaching-a-crisis-point-uc-berkeley-humanities-professors-lower-expectations-for-assigned-readings/article_a1e6e366-9c0b-48a2-b662-5191a7120bf4.html.